USA Today: Voracious crabs poised to climb onto Antarctic’s shelf. Just waiting for a little bit more warmth.
In a post earlier today, just a few down, I noted a sudden post-election dearth of climate change stories that spend much time citing climate change scientists. Here’s one that ran election day. USA Today‘s Elizabeth Weise wrote up a report with a dramatic scenario of Antarctic slaughter. It’s in the journal Polar Biology with boost from a press release from an English oceanography center.
It says it’s too cold on the continental shelf around Antarctica for king crabs to reproduce there. But they are in the Southern Ocean a little farther offshore. And things have warmed recently, especially along the Ant. Peninsula. A little warmer more and the special biota of Antarctica’s near shore bottom might become crab food. So they say.
I can’t find anybody else who did the story. It reminds me however of a climatologist who, maybe six years ago or so, told me that the isotherm for the boundary between the sage and pinyon and juniper tree landscape of the US west, and the Sonoran or Chihuhuan or some kind of desert ecotone just south of it, is rising and hovering just below the lip of the Colorado Plateau. If it just went up another few hundred feet (don’t remember exactly), it’d be nothing but flat land into Wyoming or somewhere way north. Ecotone turmoil for sure. I wonder how that scenario is doing?
Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Oceanographic Centre Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
